Skillshare

There are several classes out there that teach you the basics of web development in popular frameworks like Django. However, most of these seem to be intended for those who are completely new to programming, or those who want to learn quickly and leverage their new skills for their business. Where does one go after completing beginner courses? How does one learn to avoid pitfalls and use all the nifty tricks that come only with experience? How does one become productive?

Truth is, programming is hard. Creating a functional system, launching it and then maintaining it in its live state is hard. It takes some effort, and make no mistake, you have to have some capacity for pain, because catching bugs in your code can be quite painful. This is not meant to scare you off though. When you get it right, and you definitely will, the pleasure obtained from seeing your shiny new project work, all components in unison, is dangerously addictive. That's what we're here to achieve. And the role of a mentor cannot be overstated in this iterative learning process, which is the role I'll be playing.

This class assumes that you have, at the minimum, some experience writing code in Python - not necessarily at work. It also requires you to have a Unix-based OS, such as Linux or MacOS, and if you have Windows, we will develop in Ubuntu, which is a flavor of Linux, using VirtualBox. Programmers who have started out but did not have quality mentorship and want to fill in the gaps in their learning and folks who've graduated with a computer science education but don't know where to start with their careers or were not as fortunate when it comes to jobs are the main audience, but you're welcome for the ride, as all it really takes is the will to learn!

After this class, you will hopefully have a better, deeper understanding of your code and will be self-sufficient when it comes to answering any questions needed to accomplish your tasks at work. Some of the concepts that we'll cover here are language and framework agnostic, and hopefully you'll be able to see the parallels and common patterns in frameworks built in similar languages, such as Ruby.

What You'll Learn

Taking a Django project from development to production. You will incrementally build on the project as the course progresses and launch it on Amazon Web Services (AWS), on the free tier.
Reading and building off of third party code. You will learn to read other peoples' code. Software development and maintenance is a highly collaborative process these days, and chances are that you already have some experience with or have atleast heard of version control systems such as Git. We will host our project on Github.
How to ask questions efficiently and seek answers from multiple sources. Learning to ask the right questions and knowing where to get answers from are skills so underrated that they will make you instantly competitive compared to the average programmer.
Getting comfy with that terminal. You have the option of using Integrated Development Environments (IDE) such as PyCharm, but the class encourages you to use a barebones text editor (I personally use MacVim with some plugins) when you're starting out. You'll learn how to navigate and effectively use the terminal, which is the mainstay of all Unix-based systems. This will also tie into deployment later, as our machine on the cloud will be a Linux machine.
Optimization and Scaling. You'll be introduced to different scenarios where basic optimization is necessary, and how one solves such problems in the real world. You'll learn how to spot areas in your code that can be optimized and when these optimizations make sense. You'll be able to use optimization techniques, some of which are built into Django, and some of which require adding software packages which are popularly used in production systems. Most important of all, you will learn how to profile.